有时，反堕胎的倡导者认为，那些持赞成堕胎立场的人通常会使未出生的胎儿失去人性，为堕胎谋杀铺平道路。Every so often,my own workon dehumanization is appropriated to make such arguments. In this essay and the next I want to show why these arguments don’t hold water.

Let’s begin with a dehumanization claim, as summed up in a comment by the journalist Kathleen Parker in anop-edforTheWashington Post, “When we use language to disguise reality — whether the developing human baby is a ‘clump of cells, a ‘fetus,’ or, even, a ‘product of termination’ — we move ever-closer to the dehumanization of us all.”

Although Parker’s claim is about the special case of late-term abortion, her comment concerns the developing, unborn human being at any stage. Thinking of the living thing within the maternal womb as anything other than a developing human baby falsifies reality and thereby facilitates the mass murder of innocent human beings.

It's important to notice right off that Parker assumes something that is at stake in the disagreement between pro-life and pro-choice advocates, namely the question that the living thing growing inside of the womb is a human baby. I’ll set this issue aside for the moment (I’ll return to it in next month’s installment), and concentrate on a different one: the question of whether those who think of the unborn as a clump of cells, fetus, or product of termination thereby commit an act of dehumanization.

Here, a complication arises, because “dehumanization” does not have a single, straightforward meaning. There’s disagreement among researchers about exactly what dehumanization is. In this essay, I’m mainly concerned with the conception of dehumanization that I’ve set out in my writings on the subject. In my viewto dehumanize others is to think of them as subhuman creatures.以这种方式对人群进行非人化会助长针对他们的致命暴力行为。这是种族灭绝和其他大规模暴行的常态。所以，从反堕胎的角度来看，如果人们将发育中的婴儿非人化，他们就会助长针对他们的暴力行为。就像纳粹剥夺了犹太人的人性，胡图族剥夺了图西族的人性一样，那些认为未出生的婴儿不是人类婴儿的人是大屠杀的帮凶。

Consider anarticletitled “Is dehumanization always and intrinsically unjust?” In it, the author, Michael Spielman, describes having written to me with the following series of questions:

从社会角度来说，你是否遇到过这样的情况，你发现“次等人”是一个合理的分类?你的书中充满了人类的例子，他们被错误地归类为“不如人类”，因为各种各样的专制目的。但你是否遇到过一个你认为在道德上站得住的非人性化案例?如果不是，那么是否可以说任何使一群人失去人性的努力本质上总是不公正的呢?

The title of Spielman’s essay doesn’t match its content, which doesn’t address the question of whether dehumanization is always intrinsically unjust. Rather, it takes for granted that dehumanization is intrinsically unjust, and then goes on to say that “abortion is ground zero in the contemporary intersect between public policy and dehumanization.”

Can you think of any other institution that is propped up on the explicit dehumanization of its victims? Though racism remains a massive global problem, nobody argues in public that immigrants, refugees, or ethnic minorities are less than fully human—and yet this is exactly the argument that's being made in the context of abortion.

Let’s consider these first two steps. The first premise—that dehumanization is inherently unjust—seems reasonable enough. Its in the second premise—that proponents of abortion dehumanize unborn children in exactly the same way that immigrants, refugees, and ethnic minorities are dehumanized—that problems emerge. To see why, glance back at my definition of what dehumanization is. None of the terms listed by Parker, or commonly used by those in the pro-choice camp, describe the unborn as subhuman animals. Furthermore, in real cases of dehumanization of the sort that leads to mass murder, the dehumanized group is thought of as dangerous and unclean—as creatures akin to rats, cockroaches, or monsters and demons. This is very far removed from talk about an embryo a fetus, or a clump of cells.

Other difficulties abound. As I explain in detail in my recent bookOn Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, dehumanization is essentially bound up with race. Before they are dehumanized, groups of people are racialized. They are imagined to belong to an alien and inferior race. Dehumanization is racism on steroids. And dehumanizers think that like race, subhumanity is transmitted biologically by descent: if an individual is subhuman, it must be the case that at least one of their parents is subhuman too.

Neither of these criteria apply in the abortion case. Pro-choice advocates to not suppose that there is a race of fetuses, or that their mothers and fathers are subhuman creatures. Finally, to top it off, those who dehumanize others hold that subhumans cannot transform into humans by any natural means. Subhumanity is a life sentence. But even the most ardent pro-abortion people fully accept that fertilized ova naturally develop into human babies.

因此，堕胎支持者认为未出生婴儿失去人性的说法是有严重缺陷的。这也适用于其他非人性化的主流理论，原因有些不同。但是对于反对堕胎的人，有一种应对方法。她可能会承认，非人性化与围绕堕胎的道德争议无关，但也会声称，否认胎儿的人性与非人性化非常相似。她还可以补充说，这种对人性的否认是错误的，应该受到强烈的谴责，而以这不是非人化为由加以反对，则夸大了仅仅是理论上的技术性问题。

To evaluate this defense, we’ve got to dig deeply into the concept of the human. That will be the topic of next month’s installment.